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Interview with Actor Nick Sandys

By Meghan Beals McCarthy

MBM: I am so excited to get into rehearsals and watch the internal Jekyll & Hyde world be built by you, Jessica and the rest of the ensemble. (The external world is going to be gorgeous! The design team is incredible.) And Jekyll is an amazing role; what are you doing to prepare?

NS: I, too, am very excited to begin. I have begun re-reading sections of the play again, each day. We have a short rehearsal period, just in terms of weeks, so we will have to hit the ground running. I have also re-read the Stevenson short story again, just for any more clues and descriptions that can get the imagination working, and have done a little academic reading on the book, just to see where current scholarship is leading, since I know little about Stevenson's legacy other than that gained from the frequent film and television versions of his novels. Other than that, I am playing Benedick [in Much Ado About Nothing]-- about as far from Jekyll as you can get, which is a terrific stretch and will provide and exciting leap in the opposite direction. I accepted the offer to play Jekyll partly because I thought this role and this version would be a tremendous challenge.

MBM: What do you think of Hatcher's adaptation? I think it's kind of delicious.

NS: I think the adaptation is very smart, very theatrical, and very challenging -- as it should be. This is story telling at its height, especially since it is a story we all think we know. So as designers and performers we all have to come up to the high standard that Jeffrey Hatcher has set us in terms of coming at it anew. His version is shocking, and raw, as well as theatrically sophisticated, so it will draw on all the skills we can muster to meet its challenges, physically and emotionally -- in the mode of great horror stories, it pushes the performer and viewer into extremes of behavior and keeps you there on the edge. I also think Hatcher has managed to introduce a whole deeper level in the emotional story, and the strange tenderness at its heart.

MBM: You are no novice when it comes to portraying literary figures onstage; you last graced Northlight's stage as Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Do you get nervous playing such well-known characters?

NS: I do have to work through some nerves, simply because you know that everyone will come with added expectations, including myself--though I think that was perhaps tougher for Darcy, as he is every woman's fantasy of romance literature (or at least, for all Austen fans, of which there are millions), and then likewise of playing Freud the next year, in Galati's Oedipus Complex at The Goodman, since everyone also leaps to conclusions about who he was and what he thought because of his misrepresentation in current popular culture. And I must also try to rid myself of my own buried assumptions about the character drawn from the versions I too have read and seen--even though that is actually impossible, of course, and one is always building upon, or reacting to, the traditions created by the prior cultural representations of these mythic characters. But that is no different than if one were playing a famous Shakespearean character. There have been brilliant interpreters of these characters that one can learn from, and one can pay tribute to one's predecessors without stealing from them. After all, it is no more impossible for us to come at these stories completely afresh than for the audience--and it is to them and for them that we must re-tell this story for the first time and bring our own thrills to them.

MBM: Speaking of Pride and Prejudice, many of the same cast members will be in Jekyll & Hyde. Looking forward to the reunion?

NS:  I think five members of the six-person cast were involved with P&P, and several became very good friends during that show. It was a delight to work on--and I am truly happy to have the chance to work and play with them again, especially on something so totally different--and at Northlight. In fact, Patrick Clear and I will be performing together for the sixth time in three years, the first being P&P...and I don't THINK he's sick of me yet.....

MBM: (I should know this... sorry) Have you worked with Jessica before? What are you looking forward to most for rehearsals?

NS: I worked with Jessica three seasons ago at Remy Bumppo Theatre, on a very different piece, a 1920s comedy called Aren't We All? by Frederick Lonsdale, in which I played a small role of a romantically-inclined Australian. So I am really looking forward to teaming up again for many reasons: the script is far more theatrical and I am really looking forward to the process of creating the show's physical vocabulary with Jessica, because she has a great visual sense; she is so smart and yet warm, which I think is an ideal balance for this piece, which needs to balance its theatricality constantly with its heart--and its nerve-jangling; and she is also funny--it's going to be an exciting creative process.

MBM: When was the first time you read the novella (or any of Stevenson's work), and what did you think then as opposed to now? Knowing that you are going to embody the work, how does it affect your reading of it/what do you look for?

NS: I read the story, probably, when I was 12 or 13. My mother used to read novels to us at bedtime when I was very young, and since she new most of the classics very well, she we excise the boring bits or those she felt not suitable or sleep-inducing. So she read us Kidnapped and Treasure Island but not Jekyll & Hyde. But of course, I had already seen the Lon Chaney/Karloff horror movies, including the Frederic March and the later Spencer Tracy Jekyll/Hyde, and as a 12-year-old found the story a little staid. Of course, I had no sense of its narrative sophistication or literary heritage, of how it was playing with the art of story telling, of narration, just as Poe had done in his suspense stories. I then read it again some 5 or 6 years ago when recording a version on CD-rom for reading-challenged early teens (for Don Johnston Inc) in here the suburbs. I played all the characters, so returned to the novel to find details that I could build on to create the different voices. Having recently studied narrative techniques in my post-graduate studies, I was immediately struck by the book's unusual structure and use of the letter-form to build tension and suspend both the narrator's and reader's full knowledge until the last possible moment. Now as I approach it again, I find of course that I hear the play echoing behind the story. I look for how and why Hatcher has made his adaptations and additions, how he has broadened the world of the novel and brought in some key new elements from the period to expand the story's social consciousness and sophistication. And I look also for the brilliant Stevensonian descriptions of the fog, of the London streets, elements that we must imaginatively realize on the stage in order to create the fullest pictures for the audience, since the stage version has minimal, stylistic settings.

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ARTISTS

CAST (in alphabetical order)
Patrick Clear (Ensemble)
Thomas J. Cox (Ensemble)
Cindy Gold (Ensemble)
Nick Sandys (Jekyll)
Cora Vander Broek (Elizabeth)

PRODUCTION
Jeffrey Hatcher (Playwright)
Jessica Thebus (Director)
Collette Pollard (Set Design)
Tatjana Radisic (Costume Design)
John Horan (Lighting Design)
Victoria DeIorio (Sound Design)
Meghan Beals McCarthy (Production Dramaturg)
Adam Ganderson (Production Stage Manager)

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All photos by Michael Brosilow.

Photo Gallery

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Scene 1

Scene 1	Scene 2	Jessica Thebus interview - highlights
Jessica Thebus interview - in depth

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No one's exactly who they seem to be in 'Jekyll'

Most actors play multiple roles

BY HEDY WEISS Theater Critic/hweiss@suntimes.com

September 27, 2008

It is a good bet that most of those who head to Northlight Theatre's production of "Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde" will be familiar with the notion of dual personality that plays itself out to such extremes in Robert Louis Stevenson's tale -- a tale that pre-empted Sigmund Freud's theories of the subconscious, and said a great deal about the social and sexual attitudes of the Victorian age.

But Jeffrey Hatcher's sharp, at moments brutally funny, speed-of-light stage adaptation of Stevenson's 1886 novel -- for which director Jessica Thebus has devised an equally dizzying, fittingly graphic, spine-chillingly brutal (but always witty) production -- suggests style is as crucial as substance when it comes to unspooling this psycho-anatomy of Dr. Henry Jekyll (Nick Sandys). Jekyll, of course, is the brilliant but volatile gentleman, a physician and pharmaceutical researcher, whose "alternate personality," Mr. Hyde (at times embodied by Danny McCarthy), could not be more perverted.

Of course no one is exactly who they seem to be here -- a conceit underscored by having most of the actors play multiple roles. Even Dr. Jekyll's butler (Cindy Gold, that master of deadpan verbal timing) is a woman in man's clothing. And Collette Pollard's sensational set of six giant doors, black and blood-red only heightens the sense of the "hinged" and "unhinged."

Sandys, brainy and stylish, works like a true demon as he sweatily dissembles. McCarthy is the ruffian who savages prostitutes. And there is razor-sharp work by Patrick Clear, Thomas J. Cox and Cora Vander Broek (the working girl with a darkly masochistic streak).

'Jekyll and Hyde' subverts good and evil

By Chris Jones | Chicago Tribune critic

September 30, 2008

Back when Robert Louis Stevenson penned "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," the book-devouring public liked their villains villainous and their good doctors, good doctorly.

Not anymore. Now we like to ponder whether the good is really all that good. And villains like Hyde? Aren't they just a little bit sexy?

Such, at least, is the state of play in Jeffrey Hatcher's weird new dramatic version of the iconic yarn in an impassioned but decidedly schizophrenic Northlight Theatre production from Jessica Thebus.

In essence, Hatcher has muddied up the usual boundaries in the tale. If you know the book (or Frank Wildhorn's Broadway musical) you'll know Mr. H. goes around undoing all the good done by Mr. J. And you'll know that Hyde's chief victim, a young woman of dubious repute but needy heart, falls for the gentle J. but gets done in by the evil H.
Not now. Here, she likes Hyde from the start. And that Jekyll dude isn't so pure after all.

Now, those of us with more Jekyll-like personas are familiar with the phenomenon of members of the opposite sex preferring a Hyde. And I don't question Hatcher's right-obligation, even-to bring something new to what's a very familiar story. But it's still a very strange marriage. Although the structural ideas are very progressive, the content remains so prurient-in this production, at least.

Some of the time, it feels as if you're watching a full-on, throbbing Gothic horror show-replete with bodice-ripping sexuality-and some of the time it feels as if this is some campus theatrical experiment. The result will, I fear, satisfy neither the melodramatic traditionalists, who will find its subversions intrusive, nor those with postmodern tastes, who'll find all of this violence against a vulnerable young woman to be distasteful, at minimum.

Thebus, a very capable director in general, struggles to find her way through these troubling dichotomies. Four different and decent actors-Cindy Gold, Patrick Clear, Thomas J. Cox and Danny McCarthy-share the role of Hyde. This is fun to watch, and it makes a point about evil and identity, but it's also a tiring and pretentious device that drove me nuts by the end.

Nick Sandys, who plays Jekyll, and Cora Vander Broek, who plays poor Elizabeth, at least get to keep the same parts throughout and they do just fine (Vander Broek's performance is quite moving in places). And there's a cool set from Collete Pollard that's replete with spinning doors and macabre throughout.

But really. A "Jekyll and Hyde" that wants to rehabilitate Hyde? Oy.